Head or Gut?

What would you do if a robber points a knife at you and wants you to give him all that you have with you; your cell phone, money, diamond wedding ring, watch that your spouse gave you at your last birthday…? Would you “use your head” and give him all your valuable belongings with you or would you “go with your gut” and make a quick, clever move to get his knife? This is an extreme situation that can unfortunately happen sometimes in which most people behave in the same way and use their heads by doing whatever they are told by the offender. However, life has various scenes that can be seem less simple or less dangerous but also can be more complicated, which people cannot be sure how they react against the situation. In this complexity, we sometimes use our heads, and sometimes go with our gut, sometimes do both depending on the situation and/or on our characters. Whichever we prefer to do, what would be talked about at the end is the result of our preference. Since there is always a possibility for a positive or a negative result, to decrease the possibility for the negative, we should use our heads first, and then go with our gut later.

There are a lot of examples of difficult situations in life in some of which people use their heads to solve but end up losing, or vice versa. For example, a businessman who wants to improve his business but at the same time is afraid of jeopardizing it, probably does a lot of research before jumping into a new investment. He might waste his time too much researching and end up missing the opportunity to get the most interest from that investment. Or he might just go with his gut to guess the most suitable time to invest his money into a new business and win because in that way he would ahead of his competitors. What would you call the business man who lost – too vigilant or imprudent? And what would you call the other businessman who went with his gut and won – brave and smart or just lucky? However, the example could always be unequivocally reversed.

Whether we use our heads or go with our gut when faced with a difficult situation, in fact the result determines how we are evaluated later on or even how we evaluate our own situations. To have a good result, which of course everybody would want, first we should use our heads to eliminate or at least to diminish the obstacles that could prevent us from succeeding. In this way, we would be more aware of what we are about to do. After being more aware of the situation and of ourselves in that situation, we can go with our gut.